


whether by accident or fortune

by witchfall



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Canon Compliant, Established Relationship, F/M, Miqo'te Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Patch 5.4: Futures Rewritten, Patch 5.4: Futures Rewritten Spoilers, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, and then i put it in a non canon au just for the flavor but you can barely taste it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:00:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28112805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchfall/pseuds/witchfall
Summary: She lingers in the slight way his breath catches. Would there ever be enough time together, away from their duties? She should be thankful for what they have. Maybe she would never feel like it’s enough. Maybe she’ll always be insatiable.[5.4 OTP fluff nonsense.]
Relationships: G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch/Warrior of Light
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	whether by accident or fortune

**Author's Note:**

> no one was asking what my ship was doing in 5.4 but don’t worry I have the answer! Set in my Two WoL AU if you squint, where Izzie and G’raha are joined by [Mihren and Ardbert](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26959921). Title from Zephyrus, by the Oh Hellos.

Izzie barely grasps the lightning shard between her fingers -- feels its heady zing, right up her spine -- when her next question is answered before she can ask it.

_Bravo! That was quite a show, adventurer! Why, the spectacle proved so enthralling that all thoughts of the prize slipped my mind..._

Levin shoots through to her heart. Her throat tightens, scattering her breath. It is no fault of the crystal; it is the voice sending her back in time, to when she was younger and flightier and so enamoured that she thought it to be fury. 

_I appear to have forfeited our little race. Congratulations -- the lightning shard is yours._

She crosses her arms over her chest and smirks, like that could stopper her overflowing heart. “Really?” she says flatly. “No dramatic entrance? You’ve changed.”

Raha steps out from behind a nearby stone, smiling sheepishly as his ears flatten. He glows red under Azys La’s eternal, stormy twilight. “...you remember that?”

“You tried to steal from me!”

“In my defense,” he says, “I was caught up in the moment. It isn’t every day you meet an honest-to-gods hero after all…”

He reaches her and she is drawn to him like iron. She leans forward from her waist, arms still folded in, looking up at him just slightly as if to hide the bigness of her reaction with her own betraying body. “What was that for?”

His smile broadens. “In truth? I rather like remembering the day I met the love of my life.”

Izzie snorts and straightens up. He does this on purpose, she knows it, but she still wishes she could bottle up the white-hot delight that bubbles beneath her heart for later.

“And also finding ways to embarrass us both,” he continues. “You were not charmed, as I recall.”

She can’t resist the fizz of her growing smile anymore. She is emboldened by the way his eyes shine brighter in turn. “I was gonna kick your ass.” 

“And I would have deserved it. I was cringing, thinking of it.”

But she remembers the joyful thrill of realizing someone like _him_ wanted to impress _her_. Some nobody adventurer who stumbled into herodom before a handsome, learned boy not much older than she. She brushes hair out of her face. “I remember thinking, actually, that you would have liked it, so that’s why I didn’t do it.”

It was his turn to sputter into a thick laugh. “Really?”

“You were very annoying.”

He does that thing, then, that makes her unable to look at him properly. He _beams_ at her, like he’s the moon to her light, and she has to turn away from the brightness of his love. “It’s not every day I get to watch you do what would give other adventurers pause so handily and with _ease_ ,” he says. “You did it then, too. I’m very lucky.”

She tightens her arms across her chest. “This is a very charming way to get out of doing any work.”

His eyebrows recede beneath his bangs. Caught. “Well...I did say that I would happily claim third place.”

She can’t help it. She taps his cheek with a gloved finger. “Uh-huh.”

His voice lowers, a secret for her. “I couldn’t give up this chance, you know. Though you still have a race to win…"

She waits there. Lets her finger slip down to his jaw and then to his shoulder in this shared piece of time, away from the demands of the other Scions. She lingers in the slight way his breath catches. Would there ever be enough time together, away from their duties? She should be thankful for what they have. Maybe she would never feel like it’s enough. Maybe she’ll always be insatiable. Maybe he understands; he always seems to hear her thoughts on the wind, untranslatable outside their strange wavelength. She lays her whole palm against the thick of his shoulder and spreads her fingers wide, as if to send him every heartbeat he turns ersatz.

He softly takes her wrist. “Thank you.” He brings her hand to his mouth and presses a kiss into her palm. Something shy in her unfurls. “For bringing me here.”

Nothing but truth left to it. “I’d bring you anywhere,” she says.

It’s only the thought of Alisaie’s disapproving glare that prompts her to turn away. But she is glad of the sureness that he will follow, close as a shadow at noon.

* * *

He finds her curled over a tome in the Rising Stones’ library, the shape of a C against a creaky bookcase. G’raha glances -- back, forth, seeing no others -- and then slips in beside Izzie to steal the moment of privacy for himself.

He sits upon the cold floor and settles close enough to brush her shoulder with his. She looks up, then. Her smile, small and self-conscious, spreads like dawn light. 

She reaches for his hand and he weaves their fingers together upon the stone tiles. "You're back," she says, treasure in her voice.

"I told you I wouldn't be long." Briefing the city-state leaders in a whirlwind series of meetings on the nature of Fandaniel’s towers went by quickly with Krile and Alphinaud’s help -- its own thrill, to be working alongside them again.

"I thought for sure you'd have to be gone the night..." she mumbles.

"From you?"

Her smile turns sharp before her free fingers playfully brush against his chest in the silhouette of a flick with none of the anger. He laughs, unable to help it. Her head tilts. Her hair falls over her shoulder, smooth as bloodletting.

Sometimes he wishes to bundle her away, far from dangerous eyes, so he could kiss her without worrying about someone prying into her vulnerabilities.

"What were you doing in here?" he asks.

"I thought you'd like to see it," she teases, "me surrounded by books." A heartbeat passes as her gaze slides away. "I'm trying to...I don’t know. Stop thinking about Fandango or whatever his name is."

He glances down at her tome. "By working through an unintelligible book on disproven aethercraft theories?" His smile lingers. “That sounds more like something I would try.”

Unexpectedly, her face mottles red. 

"...oh." Something in her voice is deeply downtrodden. "I was..." 

G’raha’s ears shoot up. His tail flicks. He can near smell it on the cool air of the Stones -- her rising bashfulness and uncertainty. The dirty tang of self-abasement, a taste he is familiar with. 

“I was trying to research like you all do.” She unceremoniously deposits the book on the floor. “So, that...explains...a lot…”

He squeezes her hand. “What is it?”

“It’s stupid.”

He lingers in the silence with her. He does not press, save the constant pressure of his fingers against her knuckles. And...well, he can’t help it; he brushes his free hand across her brow to move her hair just so -- to feel the silk of it on his skin -- before he presses a small kiss on her cheek when he knows no one is looking. 

But that seems to be the trick.

She looks up at him through her hair. It moves like it has a mind of its own, though it’s smoother than he’d ever known it; everyday he is reminded that Mihren has finally convinced her to take care of herself and he had not been here to see it.

He is now.

“What do you think it would have been like if we’d met at the Studium?” She smiles sweetly. “Or...whichever learning place you were at. I can’t keep them straight.”

“The Isle of Val,” he says.

“Whatever. You were on an island of brilliant people.”

He laughs, though her stinging words still linger. _It’s stupid._ “What is this about?”

“I was just...you know, imagining.” She gestures outward with one splayed hand, movements quick as a bird. She’s nervous about this, fragile with unchecked energy. “You’re all so...so _learned_.” She trills _learned_ in an exaggerated voice. “You wrote books about important things--”

“Theses are often very much not that--”

She baps his chin in a fluid motion, and keeps speaking like she’d done nothing at all. “ -- and I was lucky to learn my letters and numbers. I know where I stand.” His heart thunks painfully, hearing that dismissal, but she presses on. “I figured with Fiddlysticks promising death by magical tower that I should try and do my own research, but I don’t...have the patience for it. But maybe I would have. This other Izzie.” 

Some days he is shot back in time. A glance can set him off. A twist in her tone, reverb in the melody.

 _You can sing and play instruments and know everything there is to know about Allag, huh?_ She had said this to him once, sweetness beneath the snippery. It had been warm in Mor Dhona that day and the air smelled of wisteria, hanging in hardy clumps from the crystal-shorn cliffs. _You just have everything, don't you?_

"Raha?"

He blinks. "Mmm?"

Her seaglass eyes pin him to the floor. “You didn’t answer me.”

He leans back against the bookcase, pondering her out of the corner of his eye. "You would have been a right terror. Too many rules."

Her brow quirks. “Oh?”

“The rules are various and labyrinthian. They’re made to guide young scholars down a set path of rigorous exercises in preparation for knowledge.” His mouth curves into a grin, near of its own accord. “Since when have you ever liked to follow another man’s path?”

He earns her smile, then, a slow and glowing gift. “I’m no good at it.”

“For good reason. I find it hard to imagine a carefully obedient young woman would have torn down the lies of the Holy See, for one thing.” 

Her smile remains, but her eyes slide askance, capturing an errant thought. She pulls in her knees and curls inward around them. “But what would you have thought of me? If I had been a student…”

Ah.

He releases her hand, if only to wrap his arm around her archery-built shoulders. He waits until her tension starts to release before he speaks. “It is a curious thing, isn't it? To think of all the times and worlds that could exist?” 

Her eyes narrow and he grins again. 

“Yes, I’m getting on with it,” he says. “Because I do like to think that we would at least be friends in every world that exists.”

Her shoulders slacken further.

“Though I think you forget, my love,” he continues, turning his mouth close to her ear, “that I don’t think you would have liked _me_ very much.”

She snorts out a laugh. “Maybe hypothetical scholar Izzie would be very into _Your Highness_.”

He digs his nose into her hair. She smells of cloves and desert wind and he relishes the way she curls in toward him, whispering the song of her laugh. “Ha ha,” he says. “And does the Warrior Izzie find him wanting still?”

“Mmm.” Her voice wobbles with burgeoning embarrassment from his affection. She hides in his shoulder. “He’ll do.”

Even then, she leans wholly into him, trusting him to support her weight as she tilts her balance. Small gifts, every day. He’s seen too much and so he cherishes the small things, like refilling her coffee at breakfast or the way she quietly adjusts his scarf before they step into the world, apart.

"I’ll always find you," she says, thoughtful and sudden. "I think that's true."

He had been painfully aware of all the things he did not have, back in those wet summer days. Her love hollows out his past of its sharper aches and carves strangeness into each memory, to think of a time when he didn’t know of her warmth or feel her love like a well-worn coat.

“I think that’s the beauty of our circumstances.” He closes his eyes. “There could be a thousand, thousand worlds. And here we are.”

Ever the maestro of the unexpected, Izzie laughs.

“One thousand Izzies for one thousand Rahas.” A piece of her hair flies forward. “And that would mean...one thousand Mihrens...and Ardberts...it’s too powerful, you know. No wonder the Ascians wanted a rejoining.”

He grins at that. 

“They can’t even handle one.” Her gaze sharpens. “ _You_ can barely handle one…”

His face turns hot. He sputters out a chuckle. “And this, my dearest star, is why you would be a terror in any scholastic situation I could possibly conceive of.” He lifts his forearm from around her shoulders only to pat the top of her head. “No professor would ever be able to predict you.”

She taps his nose. “I’m not boring enough.”

She rises in a single, smooth motion, stretching her arms toward the ceiling. He watches her -- the aurora to his sky.

“Let’s go find dinner,” she declares. “I’m starving.”

“Studying does make one famished.”

His beloved summer breeze winks -- “We’re _not_ eating that disgusting fish bread” -- and tugs him up from the floor, humming as she brings him out of the dark library. And he laughs. What else can he do, in the face of everything he’s asked for?

**Author's Note:**

> It’s an experiment in characterization, I tell myself, but really Raha’s little meet cute recreation lived rent free in my head for days even though it’s so short it’s not even in the Inn Room Book!!!! I live in this garbage can for life. Don’t look at me.


End file.
